Often times big enterprises have difficulty keeping pace with changes in technology. This means more often than not operations teams are responsible for legacy systems and are constrained by the monitoring tools that were built to support those legacy systems. Just because your technology hasn’t changed in decades, however, doesn’t mean you can take advantage of the latest in production monitoring tools.

Last month we introduced AppDynamics X to enable developers and third parties to build extensions for AppDynamics Pro. In this post we will highlight one of our most recent integrations for working with mainframes. Our partnership with DG Technologies enables enterprises to get deep monitoring of their legacy systems with MEAS and AppDynamics Pro.

Organizations that have any dependency on zOS applications will now have the ability to leverage the most innovative, quick to value and scalable approach to Application Performance Monitoring. AppDynamics gives companies the ability to solve very complex problems quickly instead of spending time and consulting dollars configuring and maintaining legacy APM products that have been the only option until now. The integration between AppDynamics and MEAS is game changing for the enterprise mainframe market.

The MEAS Mainframe Monitoring Extension integrates the MEAS system with AppDynamics Pro to give users visibility into key events and metrics for applications that execute on the Mainframe z/OS platform or traverse both open and mainframe platforms. The operations team can utilize a single tool and methodology to monitor both open and mainframe applications plus applying policies against all metrics. Leveraging AppDynamics and the MEAS Mainframe monitoring extensions provides:

Visibility into mainframe applications or mainframe applications called from distributed systems

z/OS Dashboard

DB2 Dashboard

Custom Event Notifications

Business Transaction drill-down to DB2 backend

“The partnership with AppDynamics is very exciting and game changing for our clients and our company! Organizations that have any dependency on the zOS platform will now have the ability to leverage the most innovative, quick to value and scalable approach to Application Performance Monitoring. AppDynamics gives these companies the ability to solve very complex problems quickly instead of spending time and consulting dollars configuring and maintaining legacy APM products that have been their only option until now.” Deb Gannaway, CEO, DG Technologies

The AppDynamics team is excited to announce the official launch of AppDynamics X, a new exchange for plugins, integrations and extensions for AppDynamics Pro, and AppSphere, an AppDynamics community portal for application management professionals to maximize their deployment of AppDynamics Pro.

AppDynamics X
AppDynamics is a flexible and scalable platform for application management data. That means that there’s a lot you can do with your data in addition to what we provide in our Pro product. With the AppDynamics APIs you can build your own extension of AppDynamics Pro to collect data from any component of your infrastructure (databases, caches, queues, hardware, etc.), integrate with other tools, or even auto-scale your application in your favorite cloud. In addition, you can use the AppDynamics APIs to build custom alerts, remediation mechanisms and visualizations for your application.

The AppSphere community enables IT operations and developers to share best practices and introduce new innovations for application performance management.

AppSphere is an open community that serves as a one-stop learning destination for all AppDynamics users. It enables application support teams to trade ideas, share best practices, and explore new trends in application performance management as well as IT operations. Forums exist for AppDynamics Pro customers who wish to discuss insights on how best to leverage the solution, but any IT professional with a vested interest in application performance management can join in and engage with issues pertaining to managing complex applications, Java/.NET/PHP performance tips, DevOps, and more.

I believe this quote from Jyoti Bansal (our CEO) best describes the spirit of the community:

“The AppDynamics customer base is passionate, as evidenced by our Net Promoter Score of 81 and the worldwide demand for our solution. Therefore, we’re happy to further empower both AppDynamics customers as well as application support teams everywhere with our AppSphere community and AppDynamics X platform. We believe that the best ideas and insights are generated through conversation and collaboration, and that’s why we’ve made these communities available to those with a vested stake in the performance of critical applications. We look forward to seeing what new innovations arise from their engagement, participation, and dialogue.” — Jyoti Bansal, Founder & CEO of AppDynamics

Integrations in action

Here is what John Martin of Edmunds.com had to say about our Splunk integration:

“Being able to bridge two indispensable tools such as AppDynamics and Splunk Enterprise is absolutely essential to our day-to-day operations. The ability to go into one of these tools and click my way into one or the other at that exact point in time for an issue that I’m researching is just fantastic.” — John Martin, Sr. Director of Production Engineering, Edmunds.com.